Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Some Things Don’t Belong in a Museum, or Thoughts on The Relic

The
Relic (1997) always reminds me of an expanded Stephen King story from 1979 you
may remember, “The Crate”, that also became one of my favorite segments in
Creepshow (1987, the one with Hal Holbrook and Adrienne Barbeau as Billie); where
a forgotten crate from an unexplored region of South America releases a monster
that runs amuck in a museum.See
what I did there?I could be
describing either movie.

There’s
something inherently Lovecraftian about museums and ancient monsters from far
away places, and Penelope Ann Miller stars as Dr. Margo Green, the evolutionary
biologist at the Natural Museum of Chicago.Tom Sizemore is Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, investigating
the murders in the museum.The beast
in question is a Kothaga; imagine a sort of chupacabra-esque Predator-dog mating
with Zuul from Ghostbusters (1984).With a clever but completely unnecessary twist ending, likely a hangover
from the original 1995 novel, which I didn’t bother to read.(There’s only 24 hours in the day,
people, and I can only do so much for you).

Produced
by Gale Anne Hurd, whose credits include The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986),
Tremors (1990), Armageddon (1998), Aeon Flux(2005), and TV shows
like The Walking Dead(2010) and Fear the Walking Dead(2015) and from
director Peter Hyams from End of Days (1999).Also with practical creature effects by
makeup genius Stan Winston, if you’ve watched movies, you’ve seen his work,
let’s just list his Academy Awards: Aliens (1987), Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1992) and an obscure dinosaur film you may have heard of, Jurassic Park
(1994).